[Case Study]- Digital Marketing Strategy of BJP

29/04/2019

Digital media is not as long as BJP is. But, the way one of the leading political parties of India has used it in recent times, has become a landmark and grabbed attention across the whole world. This also shows that both have incepted for each other only. The digital marketing strategy of BJP is a game-changer and this is why it is our pick of the month.

Inception of BJP

Today’s BJP has gone through many changes since its inception. When the party was first formed in 1951 by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, its name was Bharatiya Jana Sangh.

Soon after the State of Emergency in 1977, the party merged with numerous other parties to form a new party, Janta Party. The newly formed Janta Party then defeated the ruling Congress Party in the 1977 general election.

In 1980 i.e. after ruling for three years, the Janta Party dissolved and formed BJP or Bharatiya Janta Party. Today, BJP has numbers of brainstorming faces who broke the 10-year ruling journey of the Congress party headed by then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.

In the 2015 general elections, BJP tactfully used the strength of social media and made it one of the reasons for the overwhelming win. This time again in 2019 general elections are on the surface, and BJP’s digital marketing strategy is the talk of the town.

Goals of BJP

In the last 5 years, BJP has led Indian politics from the front. No other party, even the largest opposition party, Congress has been able to combat the tactics of the alliance of BJP and NDA.

Whether you say Demonetization, Surgical Strike for UDI, the launch of Digital India, PMKVY, Jan Dhan Yojana, and the recent Surgical Strike for Pulwama martyrs, all these incidences have been masterly programmed.

This happened all because BJP was in the center with the majority of votes. This majority was if not more, and then no less was delivered by social media.

In the meanwhile, BJP has numbers of objectives-

Establishing India as a Hindu nation

Making India as one of the strongest economies in the world

Creating India as the next-big defense spearheads

Availing all sorts of amenities to Indians, majorly, home, electricity, LPG, and others

Digital Marketing Strategy Plan of BJP

Fans and Followers

Bharatiya Janta Party leads the social media being actively present on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The party owns the highest numbers of fans on Facebook compared to its competitors, i.e. approx. 16 million.

On Twitter, BJP’s Twitter handle BJP4India having 10.9 million followers is now ahead of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which has 4.8 million followers. Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official Twitter handle bags 46.8 million followers whereas Arvind Kejriwal, the CM of Delhi and AAP’s President has 14.8 million followers.

BJP is also ruling the roost on YouTube with 1,279,940 subscribers and over 1 million views. The official YouTube channel of the party takes feeds from the official channel of Narendra Modi having 2.1 Million subscribers and over 14 million views till today.

Digital Marketing of BJP

After two consecutive defeats in 2004 and 2009, respectively the Bharatiya Janta Party united with more aggression and unity and come up as a more accomplished party, focusing equally on traditional and modern age tactics for election campaigning. The party has turned the table down with a radical shift in their approach by projecting Growth and Development as the main agenda in their manifesto.

The digital marketing strategy of BJP kept it ahead of all parties in the 2014 General Election. In fact, according to a reliable source, a recently held BJP meeting in Uttar Pradesh, it was said if social media was the X-factor in the 2014 General Election; 2019 will make it ubiquitous. More to this, the same source revealed that BJP has planned to have a social media coordinator for every single booth in 2019 polls.

To understand the ambitiousness of whole social media concept of BJP in 2019, consider this- every booth comprises around 2,000 voters, and this indicates that the BJP social media team across the country would consist of approx. 4 lakh social media coordinators. This would happen if the data of country’s voters given by Election Commission would be 81.5 crores. Some of the coordinators will be existing BJP workers who are already trained social media marketers, whereas some of them will newly join volunteers.

These volunteers will get only one weapon to operate and no workstations or war rooms and that weapon would be a smartphone.

Harsh Chaturvedi, BJP’s social media in-charge of Western UP said “The teams are already firing their bullets since 2017,” and what more we need to do is to expand and so we build more teams, he added.

2019 polls are rolling out now, but the volunteers did turn up at these meetings ever before. In a meeting held on July 6 in Varanasi which was headed by Amit Shah, there were 5,000 volunteers who attended the meeting. The numbers of volunteers were good, but the party is looking to extend the numbers as they want to put in place manpower for the 1.6 lakhs booths just in U.P.

In the same meeting, BJP’s National President Amit Shah told volunteers to reach more and more rural areas and spread the message of BJP.

Shivam Chhabra, of the BJP Yuva Morcha, said: “In 2014, social media hadn’t reached to every citizen of India, so we had special teams, but in 2019 the scenario is changed, social media has reached to the last person and this is why we will spread our message to the same”.

He further explained modus operandi of BJP and this is “the national team would come up with a tweet or video which they will send all states”. The process will carry on further, states will forward that message to districts and districts will send to each block and eventually to booth worker. The booth worker will then forward it to his WhatsApp group of voters in that area.

As per the news, Harsh Chaturvedi, BJP will conduct interviews of beneficiaries of Ujjawala Scheme and Jan Dhan Yojana and render the videos to voters so that they can come to know about all of the government schemes.

The party after exploiting Facebook and Twitter to the fullest feels proud to announce its Instagram and Snapchat debut.

The concern of all these strategies is to target undiscovered horizons and states. Therefore, the party is paying extra attention to Bengal, Odisha and Kerala with several workshops being mapped out for them.

Kapil Parmar, head of social media unit, Yuva Morcha said in Bengal, they found more volunteers coming forward to them and also added in his statement that they also want to show the wrongdoings of their government.

BJP is eyeing to train everyone, and if they can’t, then they’ll just videoconference with them.

The Digital Marketing Tactics of BJP

Numerous Social Media Pages

The internet marketing team of BJP has been working cautiously towards profiling their audience at the root level. By identifying all different kinds of voters group, they have made numerous well-planned pages in order to appeal to the diverse voter segments.

This page was made in March 2015, after the party took over the command. The page has keenly focused on creating and nurturing a constant trust in the work carried by their party. They have been keeping dependability and transparency to the front.

This is an official Facebook page of BJP.

Therefore, the page targets all Indian citizens including all age groups and demographics. This page solely highlights the achievements of the BJP government in positively changing India throughout different aspects- like building homes for the poor, providing smokeless fuel for cooking to making India cleaner.

Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat (Unverified)

This page was created in January 2019 and this page dedicates towards making Indian citizens empowered. It may be considered as an online version of the radio show, ‘Mann Ki Baat’.

It has been created that would act as a social media forum that urges Indian people to share their views and let them feel heard their voice. It genuinely strikes an immediate connect, which generates from a feeling of being valued and regarded as imperative.

To create high interest and engagement levels as well as making individuals feel worthy, the content strategy of BJP has been paying attention to user-generated content since a long time ago.

They know the Indians are more like to see, hear, associate or trust a cause when they’re convinced by someone from their community rather than a politician. With that BJP is creating own team of common influencers.

BJP encourages people to join together under the ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’ campaign as well as inviting views from people through the campaign Bharat Ke Man Ki Baat’.

This way they’re emphasizing with user-generated content and building and maintaining the interest of different voter groups.

The campaign ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’ is drawing a huge amount of traction in recent times. All party leaders and workers and even Indian citizens are updating their names on social media by adding Chowkidar as a prefix.

Narendra Modi is himself promoting this campaign and Chowkidar term to the next level. This is adding a wave of UGC and engagement.

Next to this, a lot of social proof is being shared through the page My First Vote for Modi where images and comments of first-time voters are being shared as an approval of their support for BJP.

YouTube Videos for Everyone

The YouTube channel of BJP has almost completed 9 years. The channel has 1,314,817 subscribers, and 3, 892, 525 views till now. There are numbers of videos available on the channel.

Instagram to create heat

BJP Instagram handle BJP4india has 1.7 million followers. This is also helped in creating ‘Modi wave’.